Easton schools to press: Pay up or no email

The Easton Area School District will require 20 full work days and a $2,100 payment before it produces about 4,200 emails it is compelled to release under a Pennsylvania open records request.

EXPRESS-TIMES STAFF

The Easton Area School District will require 20 full work days and a $2,100 payment before it produces about 4,200 emails it is compelled to release under a Pennsylvania open records request.

The district has long fought public information requests from both The Express-Times and The Morning Call, of Allentown, for copies of the messages.

Both newspapers are seeking all messages sent and received between Oct. 1 and Oct. 31, 2010, from the district email addresses of Superintendent Susan McGinley, all nine school board members at the time and the board's general account.

The district's appeals against releasing the communications were exhausted recently when the Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld an April ruling by the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court ordering the emails' release.

In a letter to The Express-Times' attorney, school district attorney Rebecca A. Young said it will cost about $2,100 for the district to produce the requested records.

"It will be necessary to receive these funds before the district will take on the task of reviewing and redacting the requested records," Young wrote in the letter dated Nov. 15.

The amount was figured on the assumption that the average email would constitute a two-page record, for about 8,400 pages of correspondence, according to the letter. It would take about 20 full work days for a single employee "to work uninterrupted" to honor the response, the letter says.

In a phone call Friday, Young refused to say whether the district would charge The Express-Times and Morning Call $2,100 each even though both papers' requests were nearly identical. Neither paper has responded to the fee assessment, she said.

She could not immediately provide an estimate on how much the district has spent defending the requests.

Douglas Smillie, The Express-Times' attorney, said he plans to request information from the district on how it reached the $2,100 figure. State law bars the district from implementing a redaction fee, and printing costs are limited to 25 cents a page, he said. The only way the $2,100 fee makes sense is if every page contains sensitive information that needs to be redacted, he said. Even then, he doubts the time frame the district said it needed.

"It's 30 days of emails and it's going to take 20 days to review them? It didn't take that long to write them," Smilie said.

Before the Commonwealth Court ruling, both a Northampton County judge and the state Office of Open Records deemed the emails public records.

During the time spanning the records request, the district was considering $3.6 million in pool improvements at Easton Area High School and a total of $11 million in building renovations. It was also entering what would be a tough budget season and the board was considering limiting public comment during workshop meetings.

Melissa Bevan Melewsky, an attorney with the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association specializing in media law, said this is not the only case of a government body charging a high fee to access public information. Luzerne County recently announced it will only provide print copies of requested emails at 25 cents a page. State law allows digital copies to be provided for free, but Luzerne County officials say they will not do so because of security concerns, the Citizens' Voice reported Tuesday.

"It creates a potential barrier to access," she said. "Often times, that's not in the budget of a (media) business. How can it be in the budget of an average citizen?"